The Fate of the Spirit The wobbly religious lives of young people emerging into adulthood.

By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY College professors have been complaining about their students since the beginning of time, and not without reason. But in the past several years more that a few professors—to judge by my conversations with a wide range of them—have noticed an occasional bright light shining out from the dull, party-going, anti-intellectual masses who stare back at them from class to class. Young men and women from strong religious backgrounds, these professors say, often do better than their peers, if only because they are more engaged with liberal-arts subject matter and more inclined to study with diligence.

Mr. Smith concedes that the young people interviewed in his study don't appear to be "dramatically less religious than former generations of emerging adults." It is traditionally a stage in life when, without parental guidance or child-rearing responsibilities, religious ties are loosened. But the period of emerging adulthood—between young people leaving home and their marrying and setting up a home of their own—is growing longer these days, because people marry later and remain financially dependent on their parents well into their 20s. The time without steady religious observance is thus prolonged as never before.

And the costs could be high. Not only does religion concentrate the mind and help young people to think about moral questions, it also leads to positive social outcomes. Religious young people are more likely to give to charity, do volunteer work and become involved with social institutions (even nonreligious ones). They are less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs. They have a higher age of first sexual encounter and are less likely to feel depressed or to be overweight. They are less concerned with material possessions and more likely to go to college.

So why are most emerging adults so morally unmoored and religiously alienated? Mr. Smith suggests that religious institutions haven't done a very good job at educating kids in even the most basic tenets of their faiths. And religious parents often shirk their duties, too, perhaps believing the "cultural myth" that they have no influence over their children once they hit puberty. Mr. Smith has found, to the contrary, that, when it comes to religious faith and practice, "who and what parents were and are" is more likely to "stick" with emerging adults than the beliefs and habits of their teenage friends.

Oddly, most of the respondents in Mr. Smith's study, despite their own drifting away from religious belief, say that they expect to be more observant when they reach full adulthood and that they plan to rear their own children in their faith tradition. One young college student who spends a lot of time drinking and smoking pot tells her interviewer: "I think you should give them that, kind of rear them in some religious direction."